This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Jan. 4, 2013 - The sun shines brightly overhead, and the sky is blue. Children splash in the many-armed swimming pool at the comfortable resort on the Indian ocean; their mothers and fathers read and drowse poolside in lounge chairs and splash suntan lotion on reddening skin. All is calm on this day after Christmas, and then comes a quickening breeze. It rolls a red beach ball slowly across the concrete apron of the swimming pool and sets the pages of a book aflutter.
Birds shriek and take flight and a strange hum in the air turns into a roar as palm trees topple on the nearby shoreline and within a few seconds a wall of water, brown and crammed with deadly debris, rises like a fist high above the jungle and roars across the resort, sweeping trees and buildings and men and women and children inland in a maelstrom of almost unprecedented power.
"The Impossible" is a taut, harrowing disaster film based on a true account of survival. Spanish screenwriter Sergio G. Sanchez and director J. A. Bayone ("The Orphanage") focus on the travails of five people from Great Britain, a husband and wife and three small boys on vacation in Thailand, to humanize one of the worst disasters in modern times -- the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which swept across the land with waves almost 100 feet high and killed 230,000 people in 14 countries.
Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts, as good and believable as they have been in years, play the parents, but the most memorable performance is by Tom Holland as Lucas, the oldest son, who finds himself stranded on the edge of the jungle with his battered, bleeding mother, and must take charge of her -- and his -- survival. Much of the film is told from the standpoint of Lucas, as the scene shifts from the wave-devastated jungle to makeshift camps for the survivors to a badly overcrowded hospital, where there are so many people laid out in cots both inside and outside that Lucas keeps losing track of his mother, At the same time, he is searching for his father and his two small brothers, half convinced that they are dead beneath the sea.
The harrowing search to reunite the family through the stunned devastation of coastal Thailand takes up much of the movie, and it is well done and generally absorbing. But the memories most people will take away from "The Impossible" come early in the movie, as the massive tsunami wave snaps trees like twigs and sweeps human beings away like ants caught in a strong burst from a garden hose.
We are used to spectacular computer-assembled scenes of fantastic worlds that don't really exist, Middle-earth and Hogwarts and Gotham City and Avatar's Pandora, but the spectacular 20-minute tsunami scene in "The Impossible" seems horrifyingly real, down to earth. In the midst of churning chaos, people scramble frantically to save their lives by grabbing onto trees or telephone poles or each other, and eventually by crawling through a maze of water-borne debris, some of it wrapped around corpses, to higher ground.
The show business publication Variety informs us that the tsunami was created using "Thailand-based sets, a Spain-based liquid tank, several thousand tons of water and seamlessly integrated f/x" (computer and other special effects). But miraculously, there is no sense -- as there is sometimes with the undeniably spectacular films of Peter Jackson ("The Hobbit") or even Ang Lee ("The Life of Pi") -- that the computers are in charge.
Opens Friday Jan. 4
‘Promised Land’
I suspect Matt Damon is right -- the gas-extraction process called "fracking" is bad for the water supply. But I'm afraid his too earnest new movie aimed at turning popular sentiment against the process is not going to do much to change the minds of its supporters -- people who argue that we need the energy fracking would supply, while the environmental problems can be ameliorated.
Damon, who co-wrote the script of "Promised Land" with John Krasinski, plays a gas-company salesman who travels the sticks with his sales partner (Frances McDormand) convincing farmers and other landowners to sign over their mineral rights. His character, Steve Butler, makes their eyes light up with promises of multi-million-dollar payoffs. He encounters opposition from an environmental activist (Krasinski) who totes around pictures of dead cows in fields supposedly near fracking operations. Steve also runs head on into a Wise Old Coot, played by Hal Holbrook, who may actually be one.
For a movie intent on polemic, it is strange that "Promised Land" never really makes any convincing arguments for why these marginal farmers should not take bundles of money for letting the drillers drill. Instead, the fate of Damon's character and of the drilling project is determined by a plot gimmick that seems a tad cheesy. What we need is a good anti-fracking documentary. Maybe Damon, who is an admirable and talented artist as well as a rich one, could put up the seed money.
Opens Friday Jan. 4